"My children, you know, I can't make that choice for them. They either grow up to be hard-working like me, or they become dopers and sleep all day," he said to Jane, before turning to me to ask if he could have a swig of the rum.
Marijuana's drug evolved as a biological means of intoxicating would-be pests; its initial biological aim had nothing to do with man. Marijuana was at the heart of the Rastafarian movement, a movement that affected the cultural dynamic of the entire Caribbean. It is hard, even today, to find anywhere in the Caribbean that is not in some regard influenced by the style of rasta and reggae. 
It's not just marijuana. Plants have held sway over every major development in the West Indies, from prehistory to today. It is not quite the history you may expect. But, it is one history that is certainly filled with rum and blood, death, sweat, romance and pirate ships. It is the history of plants in this part of the Caribbean - the Antilles. The long grocery chain of islands that swings in an arc from Cuba to the tip of Venezuela. It is a history that Jane and I stumbled on, driving up a coast on a small island at the far end of the Antilles.
Four hundred and thirty million years ago is to plants what Abraham is to Jews - it is the beginning; the time when algae first left the wilderness of the sea, and crept onto land. Not long after that, about 350 million years ago, some sort of primitive ferns planted their first roots. A hundred million years later, the same ferns that we know today developed.
By 225 million years ago, the giant single landmass we call Pangaea began to break apart. During all this splitting, plants made a giant leap. They developed fruit; the modern plant mechanism for distributing seeds. These plants, the angiosperms, were the ultimate step in ensuring the success of the plant on Earth. Moving about is a good way to disperse your offspring. Survival is a matter, as for all organisms, of spreading your seeds far from the tree. Since plants cannot move, the development of mechanisms to get their seeds traveling about the world meant their survival, even biological domination, on Earth. Citrus came about in the world probably somewhere in Indonesia. If the pleasure of their sweet taste and easy to eat packaging seems too coincidental, it isn't. They were made to be eaten. Initially, some botanists believe, to compel lizards.
Sweetness is a force in evolution. That pulp of sugar exploits the sweet tooth - the animal gets sweets, the plant gets seed transportation, allowing the plant to expand its territory by the breadth of the animal's migration. Fruits hold off on sweetness until their seeds are ready for their mission; a fruit keeps itself camouflaged in green, and bitter and untasty until it's ready to go - when it is, it changes color - bright red, orange or yellow.
There is one fruit in particular, from one island in particular, far away from the Antilles. It's called the nutmeg fruit; a small but bright yellow little globe, that when split, yields a reasonable brown seed wrapped in a spidery bright red aril; a soft outer shell. The seed we call nutmeg, the aril we call mace. Although the plant grows on the other side of the world, its existence would transform the Antilles.
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